‘Bama vs. Florida Online Viewership Up 132% Over Last Year

Whoo! Roll Tide! Alabama walloped Florida 32 – 13 in the SEC Championship game over the weekend, delivering with it big gains in viewership on both old and newteevee.

According to CBSSports.com, 91,401 unique users consumed more than 144,236 total hours of live video from the game. To put that in perspective, that’s a 132 percent jump in unique users and 188 percent growth in total hours consumed over the same matchup last year.

The game did well on oldteevee as well, pulling in an 11.8/24 overnight rating, up 13 percent from last year. Sports Media Watch put that into perspective, saying that that rating was higher than the Daytona 500, the final round of the Masters and every game of the 2009 NBA Finals.

CBSSports has always believed that online audiences are additive and not cannibalistic to TV, and web video plays a key component in the company’s strategy. It streamed SEC football games all season long, and got 7.52 million unique visitors to watch March Madness this year.